19 Euphemisms for Oxblood

Oxblood, I like you, but your name is driving me crazy. To be fair, it’s not really your fault. It’s not your sound or your spelling that’s killing me, but your overuse, and that’s exactly because you’re seductive. You sound fancy and yet a little badass, like the posh British cousin to the American sports jersey maroon. And yet, while I get your appeal, it’s gone too far.

Suddenly everyone’s not just charmed by you, they’re rabid, slapping your name on everything in the red-brown spectrum regardless of accuracy. Searching "oxblood" on one fast fashion site brought up a search result of 18 different products, most of which are very clearly not the same color. Good on them to capitalize on the color trend of the moment, but it speaks to a larger issue. With everyone so fevered for oxblood they’re dismissing words like burgundy from their vocabularies. I’m no longer sure if the fad is the color itself or this one particular word for it.

Tomorrow I’m going to try an experiment where I start calling gray things "ash" and see if it catches on. It might prove my hypothesis. But in the meantime, I’ve found another way to solve my oxblood word fatigue: these suggestions in the slideshow below. Some are serious, some are not, but none of them give me the reaction that oxblood does lately (which is, of course, that of a cat stepping into a puddle). Enjoy.